Content management and document management systems for document versioning and collaborative project management are known. One non-limiting example may be Microsoft's Sharepoint 2013® software and application suite of tools. Microsoft SharePoint 2013® is a family of software products developed by Microsoft Corporation for collaboration, file sharing and web publishing. SharePoint 2013® may provide a user with a vast amount of content or information and it may become difficult for a user to find the most relevant information for a particular circumstance. To mitigate these issues SharePoint 2013® provides a search engine in order to assist users in finding the content that they need. A user may enter a keyword based search query and the search engine in SharePoint 2013® may return to the user a list of the most relevant results found within the context of the SharePoint 2013® platform once the content has been indexed.
At times a user may desire to find content related to geographic entities in SharePoint 2013® or other type of entity such as organizations or people referred to within a document. SharePoint 2013® does not provide out of the box functionality to automatically extract entities from documents. Particularly, it does not support geotagging content to extract geographic entities and resolve them to a geographic location. Also, SharePoint 2013 does not support entity tagging in order to identify, disambiguate and extract named entities, such as, organizations or people in a document. However, SharePoint 2013® search may be extended to enable effective geographic searches and other entity related searches, including entity-based search facets. Previous versions of SharePoint 2013® included “FAST Search” for SharePoint, from which it was possible to extend the content processing pipeline through sandboxed applications, but this was both slow and limited in the information it could access.
SharePoint 2013® introduces a much more open API which makes it possible to add specialized linguistics such as concept extraction, relationship extraction, geotagging, summarization and as well as sophisticated text analytics. Thus, an opportunity exists to extend the capabilities of SharePoint 2013® search engine to enable geographic and other entity based searches.